I watch players in melee die/down a lot more than players at range. Does show that ranged users have a huge advantage in harder fights.
Hint: Players using ranged weapons have the flexibility of running into melee to deal damage if they so wish. The same can’t really be said about players wielding melee weapons running into ranged.
For one, it would be boring if they were named as such yet have animations that are plain and dull.
Rangers have the Nature Magic trait, which implies they should have some control over any element that has a relationship with nature.
Rangers have plenty of AoE skills which apply conditions(triple traps, shortbow skills). Also, I am pretty sure the only bosses or mobs immune to damaging conditions are inanimate objects such as turrets, or special bosses like Zhaitan in Arah storyline.
Last I did AC I was sure there were constant 15+ stacks of bleeding on the boss, 8-10 of which were maintained by my ranger ticking for 110 per stack per second.
In any case, it’s actually difficult to maintain 25 stacks of bleeding on a boss in a dungeon, unless everyone is specifically and purposefully maintaining bleeds on the boss, which doesn’t happen very often because they could do more damage using their dps cooldowns.
I would like everyone to observe the debuff icons on bosses they fight and try to do everything normally like they always would, and see if they can really maintain 25 stacks of bleeding at all times. Chances are, it’s not the case.
(edited by Pikafan.3792)
Healing Power should not affect boons to fit the theme(it’s healing power, not healing AND boon power). Instead, the scaling ratios on healing skills should be buffed.
Or, another good alternative would be to increase incoming healing.
For example, 100 healing power would equate to an increase of 10% healing a player receives from all sources, including self-heals.
This would not only fit in with the theme, but help keep healing power as a viable defensive/support stat.
Did it ever occur to you that Lightning Reflexes could just be symbolic and not literal in nature? When used in daily life, the expression “lightning reflexes” just describes a reaction that is very quick.
Thunderclap could also refer to a inflicting a thunderclap headache via a blunt object as opposed to summoning lightning to daze foes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderclap_headache
In any case, your claims are frivolous at best, and nitpicking at worse.
Tanky builds are worse then the glass cannon builds. I see too many people complain when they try to play the content like other standard mmos.
You need to split the differance between damage and survivability, switch out your skills or weapons as needed and work well as a team. The Dungeons are based off player skill challenges, not level or gear like other mmos.
Tanky builds are different from tank builds, fyi.
Glass cannon – 3/3 parts offensive stats
Tank – 3/3 parts defensive stats
Tanky – 1/3 parts offensive/defensive stats, 2/3 parts defensive/offensive stats
Tank-y =/= tank, just like elementalists and guardians being healer-esque =/= them being healers.
What Leaf said.
If you are stubborn and obstinate in using a Longbow, 30/30/0/0/10 would maximise your dps.
If you get focused in WvW you die regardless of gear anyway, so just focus on offensive stats.
For PvE, open world content is faceroll easy for the most part, for dungeons, good luck if you are sporting full berserkers and having a squishy spec on longbow. The moment something so much as looks at you, you die.
Unless of course, you are farming one of the borderline to blatantly exploitable explorable dungeon paths, like CoF.
Explorable paths:
AC – every path is easy
CM – every path is easy
TA – second path is easy
HotW – second and third path are suitably difficult, but easy to complete below 30 minutes
CoF – third path is easy(if my memory serves me correctly)
The rest? Didn’t bother with them.
Exotics mean very little, to all those moaning about how their good gear should carry them through dungeons. Especially for those who run glass cannon gear/spec and expect results other than one that spells their death the moment a mob so much as looks at them.
Done HotW story and explorable in 30 minutes and under each with a group that sports greens and blues.
It’s a matter of learning the fights and knowing when to kite and when to dps.
Also, most people don’t open up with AoE CCs on melee mobs and instead resort to doing as much damage as possible. Except these mobs are designed to do more damage than players can ever hope to reach. With more health as well.
You want copious AoE CCs, which trivializes those fights. With the groups I run with, the warriors die before they ever get in range to do their otherwise devastating combos.
Examples:
Muddy Terrain, Spike Trap, Frost Trap – Ranger
Unsteady Ground, Frozen Ground, Static Field – Elementalist
Yeah I had 30 mins to kill this morning and a couple people who wanted to do a quick run. SM is fast, easy, and the reward is worth it. I save the explorables etc for evening when my kids are in bed. Darned kids and always wanting attention and stuff!
CoF, TA, HotW, CM and AC all have at least one completable-under-30-minutes explorable path.
CoF, for one, is generally done 20 minutes and below with an experienced team.
There should not be any need to be “blackmailed” into doing storyline dungeons.
- Boss and mob design. There’s some really creative stuff going on here. The final bosses of SE, CoF and TA are well designed encounters.
What are you high on and where can I get some of it?
Also, you don’t really make a bigger impact forcing readers to meander through a post frequently punctuated with ill-conceived coined terms with little meaning to everyone but yourself.
I hope you don’t nerf zerging completely to hell right away before I get to figure out the mechanics hehe. Maybe a cool down on waypoints would be a happy medium, so you cannot keep using the closest one and the more times you die you have to start further back if you release to run back?
I’m super stoked to see some dev responses in this thread, and I’m glad to know that you are looking at the dungeons! Coming from a long time raiding background I’m really enjoying the challenges and I do hope that you take a look at the rewards. I ran CM story this morning twice in a 25 minute period and the reward is the same as Arah which took my group over 2 hours last night. I’m not advocating exotic drops etc, but the cash reward at the end needs to be at least the same as 2 hours spent grind farming overworld zones.
Story mode should be something you do once and never return unless you want to help others to begin with.
Needs to have a (good)dungeon group generator/finder in any game with instanced dungeons, imo.
For that caster boss in the first path of HotW, you must have projectile reflection, or you exploit it by a method I will not elaborate here.
Using dodge and LoS-breaking aren’t exploits.
Artificially deaggroing resummoned boss adds, are, which happens to be the side effect of doing the LoS-breaking. Sorry to break your bubble, though.
Most bosses in this game are either too easy, too hard, or just plain exploitable.
Easy is tank and spank the entire fight, set autoattack and wail away for 5 minutes until the boss dies.
e.g. Fyonna in TA second path
Hard is a boss that does 2k ranged autoattacks on guardians that have an attack speed rivalling that of a ranger’s shortbow on quickness buff. God forbid you are a squishy profession, you get to take 3-4k damage instead.
e.g. Caster boss in HotW first path with unlimited adds, Greater Nightmare Vine in TA with 15-30 second respawn timer blossoms.
Exploitable is….well, pretty much all the dungeon paths being farmed at the moment. Most bosses there are downright bugged and not working the way they should, or just too faceroll.
All of these hard bosses are more than doable, I must say this, but they are obviously flawed and frustrating to deal with. For that caster boss in the first path of HotW, you must have projectile reflection, or you exploit it by a method I will not elaborate here.
I like difficulty by means of combat mechanics. Not by artificially inflating damage of a boss then trying to pass it off as something intellectually and emotionally engaging.
Trap Potency
Empathic Bond
Bark Skin
Spirits Unbound
Evasive Purity(PvP)
Lick Wounds has some issues with certain pets, like Devourers, where they sometimes refuse to bandage you and just stand on your corpse.
It is a lot weaker compared to other #3 downed skills on other professions under many practical circumstances(pvp and dungeons).
At least other professions such as the mesmer, elementalist and guardian can move enemies away from their corpse, or move their corpse away.
On the bright side, rangers should be one of the very last to go down with their wide arsenal of CCs and arguably the longest range in the game.
So this justifies the spirits sucking? Are you saying ANet shouldn’t fix the class since we have another way of contributing and leave the class lacking in a support area? I don’t know about you but I don’t want to just fill one niche in a party and play a profession that compared to other ones are crippled.
That’s your highly ignorant assumption. And we all know what “assume” does to you and me.
I didn’t say it justifies spirits sucking. I am just saying there are far more useful and effective support/utility skills a ranger has.
Also, I might point out your OP claims that rangers are not viable in parties due to spirits and that rangers lack utility – which is obviously wrong and misguided on too many levels to name.
People are moaning about spirit nerfs when they aren’t even the best utility/support skills a ranger has in his arsenal to begin with.
1st weapon set: shortbow
2nd weapon set: main hand weapon + warhorn
Utility skills:
1) Spike Trap
2) Frost Trap
3) Muddy Terrain
Elite:
Spirit of Nature
Healing skill:
Troll Unguent
Healing Spring
In any case, the best support skills in this game are generally not necessarily heals themselves. Or spirits for that matter.
Here’s a tip: the ranger’s best utility skills are not spirits.
Traps and Muddy Terrain are, with them you give your group the ability to kite melee indefinitely.
Of course, if you are talking about exploiting certain mind-numbingly easy dungeon paths, in which case the 3 offensive traps(flame, viper, spike) obliterates large groups at once.
Rangers are more than viable and are popular choices to have for groups.